Goals

When building minimally viable tab management for our blockchain browser, we set the following basic requirements:

1. Favicon
2. Page Title
3. New Tab
4. Remove Tab
5. Selected Tab Visibility

Results

Tab-Test - a lightweight playground detached from the main Dub browser to allow for faster prototyping and experimentation:

Dub Browser v0.02 (but styled):

Successes

The initial requirements were met and I successfully squashed quite a few bugs. Tab management is pretty stable in it’s current form.

Failures

Performance

Favicons and Page Titles, while functional, fetch and update at unsatisfactory speeds. There are occasional bugs where the app will stall while fetching, or simply fail to fetch entirely.

Merging (or lack thereof)

The original intention for this experiment was to merge the updated tab management interface and experience into the core Dub Browser, however this is still an active work in progress (see the styled version of Dub v0.02 above).

Styling

The current aesthetic is clean, but quite bland. I originally intended to inject more ‘dub’ into the interface, but ended up stuck focusing on functionality.

What’s Next?

I’d like to address the performance issues, however the performance of favicons and page titles is not an obstacle for usability of the browser and current performance meets the bar for minimally viable.

I’ll push forwards on merging the updated tab management features for the realease of Dub v0.03 next week.

Just today, I noticed that there is no method for tab order management which feels pretty critical. I plan to add this into Dub v0.03 as well. Ideally this will be drag and drop (similar to existing browsers) but minimally viable tab order management could just be up/down arrows.

I also would love to circle back to styling and explore radically different interface aesthetics (anything other than basic roundedness).